hich Sir William Crookes refers and
which his vision discerns as open to science.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: A Scientific Fact.]

It is a scientific fact that any vibration set up in the ether persists
to an unlimited degree, communicating itself to that which is in
correspondence with its rate of vibration. This, of course, is the
explanation of the phenomena involved in wireless telegraphy, and is
equally the explanation of the phenomena involved in telepathy. At a
meeting of the Society of Arts in May of 1901, Professor Ayrton,
commenting on Marconi's system, said that we "are gradually coming
within thinkable distance of the realization of a prophecy he had
ventured to make four years before, at a time when, if a person wanted
to call to a friend he knew not where, he would call in a very loud
electro-magnetic voice, heard by him who had the electro-magnetic ear,
silent to him who had it not. 'Where are you?' he would say. A faint
reply would come, 'I am at the bottom of a coal mine, or crossing the
Andes, or in the middle of the Atlantic.' Or, perhaps, in spite of all
the calling, no reply would come, and the person would then know that
his friend was dead. Think of what this would mean, of the calling which
goes on every day from room to room of a house, and then think of that
calling extending from pole to pole,--not a noisy babble, but a call
audible to him who wants to hear, and absolutely silent to all others.
It would be almost like dreamland and ghostland,--not the ghostland
cultivated by a heated imagination, but a real communication from a
distance, based on true physical laws."

Yet even this speculation fails to keep pace with the advance of truth,
for there is no death, in the sense in which Professor Ayrton refers to
it here, as a state of unconsciousness which no message can reach, and
from which no reply can come. On the contrary, that transformation we
call death is a condition of far more intense consciousness, of being
far more alive and far more responsive to the call and the thought. We
are learning to realize the literal truth of the phrase in the Bible,
"dead in trespasses and sins." So far as one is in sins and faults and
defects he is dead. Spiritual vitality is in goodness alone. So far as
one endeavors to follow after righteousness, to achieve and live in
truth, honor, and love, he is alive; so far as he fails in this he is
dead, and this, quite irrespective